2013 is Dromedary Records’ *20th birthday*.

All throughout this year, we’ll be doing the self-congratulatory “It’s our birthday” thing, with special shows, ultra-cool releases, and a new, reinvigorated Dromedary. We’re changing the way we’re doing things, pretty much from the ground up. We’re getting smaller (to the extent that’s possible), more localized, more DIY while still retaining our global reach through our online and distribution partners.

All this starts with a *brand new website* – which you can see here. The site has a cleaner look, and is a responsive site – meaning it’s designed to work with mobile and tablet devices, as well as whatever size monitor on which you’re viewing.

There’s a new music player (with much less music), which is not driven by Flash so you’ll be able to use it on your iPhone. We’ll keep the player limited to just a handful of choice cuts, and we’ll update it regularly – so keep visiting to hear what we’re playing, because a lot of times you’ll hear stuff that’s not available. Demos, acoustic tracks, live recordings, all kinds of stuff.

We’ve also dispensed with the Dromedary Blog as a way to disseminate news. No longer will you have to go to two different places to discover what we’re up to. *This* page is now where you’ll find every single update we have to make – whether it’s an ‘official’ piece of label news or just a snarky observation. Because of that, we’ve added a comments function here, so that you can engage in a dialogue with us about whatever we’re posting. Since we also want to communicate with you in as many ways as possible, we’ve also made it easier for you to sign up for our email list. *We promise we’re not spammers*. Our email list typically contains free music, info on new releases, info on upcoming shows, and other interesting stuff that you’ll enjoy reading.

Most noticeable, however, is the brand new e-commerce store. We’ve abandoned our old platform in favor of the one offered by Bandcamp. Bandcamp is becoming a standard in online music distribution, and it allows us quite a bit of versatility that our old online store did not. Three key pieces of this for you to know: First, we have *dramatically* reduced the prices of all our releases – standard releases are now just $5.00 for the digital download, and $7.00 for a CD, with EPs and singles even less. *Every* CD purchase now comes with a free and immediate digital download of the title you’re buying – so if you buy the Mommyheads’ new CD _Vulnerable Boy_, we’ll ship it to you ASAP, but you’ll get the ability to download it *immediately* as part of your purchase.

Second, due to the Bandcamp platform, you’ll now be able to get our releases in just about every digital format you can imagine: high-quality MP3, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, or Ogg Vorbis.

Third, we’ve gotten rid of the Zazzle merch store. Zazzle is cool, and gave us the ability to offer you all sorts of super-cool Dromedary merch, from coffee mugs to skateboards. But the truth of the matter is that the Zazzle stuff was kinda sterile. In the coming year, we’ll be introducing some hand-made Dromedary merchandise that you’ll hopefully enjoy more than a digitally-printed skateboard deck. And hopefully we’ll be offering merch from some of our bands, too, so this will become your one-stop shop for all things Dromedary.

Lastly, we’ve introduced a “Shows” section of the site. We want you to come see our bands live. But if you haven’t “liked” us on Facebook yet, you really haven’t had a reliable way to keep up to date on which of our bands (and bands in our extended family) are playing, and where. So we’ve now got a Shows page that we’ll keep updated as best as we can.

Hopefully you’ll like all the enhancements we’ve developed here.

And of course, we would be *nowhere* if it wasn’t for our pal Jim Santo of Allegra Media, who designed the whole thing according to our exacting (and very fickle) specifications. Jim, a longtime friend who’s been designing web applications for as long as there’s been a web, is a great guy to work with. Check out his “company site”:http://www.allegramedia.com for more info.